Columbus schools suspends tech director who dated investigator

Columbus school attendance scandal

Columbus City Schools employees -- and perhaps others in schools throughout the state -- are accused of falsifying students' records to improve their schools' standing on state report cards. Read the complete series.

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Columbus City Schools Superintendent Dan Good suspended the district’s director of technology on
Tuesday after
The Dispatch asked whether she broke district rules by dating a state investigator who was
examining district data-rigging.

The district assigned Michele VanDyke to home with pay “pending an investigation of an
allegation of a potential conflict of interest,” according to a document that VanDyke signed on
Tuesday.

“It allows us unfettered access to her electronic files,” and doesn’t mean she has broken any
rules, Good said.

VanDyke is to remain off district property but be available by telephone during business
hours.

The Dispatch reported on Wednesday that an investigator with the state auditor’s office,
Jim Longerbone, began dating VanDyke while he was assigned to the investigation into district
data-rigging. That case logged its first conviction Thursday when Stephen B. Tankovich, who worked
at the Kingswood Data Center with VanDyke and at one time was her boss, pleaded no contest to
felony attempted records tampering.

VanDyke has led the district’s data-processing department on an interim basis and was Tankovich’s
boss at the time he resigned as head of accountability last year. She currently carries the title
of director of technology and was paid just under $105,000 last school year.

VanDyke said that she met Longerbone in the late fall of 2012 at a gathering before an Ohio
State University sporting event. She knew he worked for the state auditor but didn’t know he was
investigating her department.

Months before they began dating, in August 2012, Longerbone had been to the Kingswood Center to
interview data analysts who reported to VanDyke. But district officials said she was not there that
day.

VanDyke said she didn’t learn of his connection to the data-rigging case until February 2013,
when the two mutually agreed to stop seeing each other because of the potential conflicts of
interest.

Longerbone didn’t tell his supervisor at the state auditor’s office about the relationship until
sometime in the early spring, and he was immediately reassigned off the data-rigging case and
instructed to end the relationship with VanDyke. But Longerbone decided to quit instead, resigning
in August 2013. He now works as an investigator for the Franklin County prosecutor’s office.

A spokeswoman for the state auditor’s office has said officials there don’t believe the
relationship compromised their investigation.